Friday, December 24, 2004

Search Engine Forums

Success in the search engines usually equates to success as an affiliate marketer. I know there are different strategies for affiliate success, including pay per click arbitrage, but to me, the purest form of affiliate marketing is building a quality website on topic, choosing good affiliate programs to promote that are related to that content, and then optimizing the site for the search engines and getting free traffic to the site.

Most SEO's keep their search engine optimization strategies pretty closely guarded, especially the REAL secrets, but you can piece together a lot of good information in the various search engine forums online. If you network well, you can get to know some of the other folks who are trying to improve at SEO, and some of them will even tell you stuff that you won't be able to find anywhere else--not even in the best forums or the good eBooks on the subject of SEO.

So here's a quick list of search engine forums for you to take a look at:

Webmaster World- This forum was recommended to me by a friend I met at another forum, and I still owe him an eternal debt of gratitude for it. There's so much info on this forum, and so much activity, that I have a hard time keeping up with it all. The only drawback to this one is that the navigation for a user isn't as user-friendly as some other forums, where you can keep up with just about everything by clicking on a link that says 'view new posts'.

Search Guild - These are the guys who sponsored the 'nigritude ultramarine' contest along with the Dark Blue affiliate network. Good info here, and a casual atmosphere.

Search Engine Watch - This is a well established forum with constant breaking news in the industry.

Search engine forums are another tool in the arsenal of a professional affiliate marketer. I don't remember exactly where I read this, but someone somewhere said that to be successful at SEO, you need to read until your eyes hurt. I think it's a good suggestion.